Exploring the impact of unpredictability of household resources on infant attention.

Early environmental unpredictability has been linked to variation in cognitive and socioemotional development, yet its role in shaping foundational attentional processes during infancy remains poorly understood. The present study examined whether unpredictability in household resources is associated with individual differences in visual attention during the first year of life. A sociodemographically diverse sample of 160 infants aged 3-12 months completed a remotely administered free-viewing visual attention task. Infant eye-gaze behavior was assessed using webcam-based eye-tracking, yielding measures of total looking time, peak look duration, and gaze shifts. Results indicated that infants of caregivers who reported higher resource unpredictability exhibited more gaze shifts during the attention task, even after accounting for the severity of resource deprivation. An exploratory analysis examining gaze shifts during the encoding phase of a visual paired-comparison task showed a similar pattern, providing convergent evidence across attention measures. Together, these findings suggest that early exposure to unpredictable resource environments may be associated with an attentional profile characterized by more frequent shifts in gaze rather than reduced attentional capacity. By distinguishing unpredictability of resources from the severity of material deprivation, this study contributes to a growing body of research examining how early environmental instability may shape emerging attention processes.